Leading With Passion

 This week, as I reviewed everything I read, wrote about, contemplated and taught my team, a common theme has stayed forefront in my mind: leaders have to be the first to endure pain, the first to sacrifice, the first to give of themselves in order for their team to be successful. The foremost responsibility of a leader it to make yourself better. To me, that entails reading books with powerful messages, meeting great people and nurturing those relationships, listening to expert speakers, and just surrounding yourself with valuable content to develop your mind in ways that are going to actually produce a successful product for your business.

I am very grateful for the opportunity to hear Tim Tebow speak at a conference this past weekend. No matter what opinion you might hold about Tim, his words I’m about to share with you are true and resonate powerfully, especially among leaders. The most beautiful thing he shared was the definition of passion. Tim defined passion as a person’s willingness to suffer in the pursuit of the accomplishment of a goal. If you are truly passionate about something, you are willing to endure suffering to reach success. The easiest example of this for me relates to my kids. As a father, I am very willing to suffer to see my kids be successful. I want to give them the opportunities to achieve success in their faith, success in their relationships, success in their education or profession…in all areas of their life. I get home every day from work and I am tired; and yet, I will happily go right into the backyard to kick the soccer ball around with my daughter, despite my exhaustion, because I want her to be successful in the areas of life in which she wants to achieve success – her soccer aspirations. I am passionate about that!

I really enjoyed this definition of passion. It empowered me to deploy focus and intentionality in the aspects of leadership, especially with regard to the principle of “digging in the trenches with your soldiers.” Don’t just ask your people or your team to suffer – if someone is going to suffer, it must be the leader first, and it must be for the betterment of the team and for the accomplishment of the goal(s).

Remember this. Deploy it. Set this example for your team.

Tebow also said, the definition of compassion is being willing to suffer WITH others in the pursuit of a goal. I challenge you as leaders to be sure you have passion for what you are doing, so you can lead the right way, whilst also creating a culture of compassion within your team. When you lead that way, you will achieve success with a team of strong and loyal people around you.